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Jewish billionaire Henry Swieca quits Columbia Business School board, saying campus is ‘unsafe’ for Jews
(JTA) — A Jewish billionaire investor and philanthropist quit the board of Columbia Business School, saying the campus had become unsafe for Jews since the launch of the Israel-Hamas war.
“With blatantly anti-Jewish student groups and professors allowed to operate with complete impunity, it sends a clear and distressing message that Jews are not just unwelcome, but also unsafe on campus,” Henry Swieca said in an Oct. 30 letter obtained Tuesday by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My resignation is an expression of my deep concern for the direction in which the university is heading.” The Board of Overseers is the school’s main fundraising arm.
Swieca, 66, is the founder in 2010 of Talpion Fund Management and the cofounder of Highbridge Capital Management, which was acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase in 2008. The child of Holocaust survivors, he has been a member of the business school’s Board of Overseers since 2014. Forbes lists his worth as $1.9 billion.
His resignation, which he did not announce publicly, comes amid a flurry of protests by Jewish supporters of elite universities in response to the schools’ handling of the Israel-Hamas war following Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. Prominent supporters of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they will or might no longer support their alma maters because of the presidents’ response to the war, and the private equity CEO Marc Rowan is reportedly trying to get others in the finance field to withhold donations over the issue.
In his letter, Swieca refers to a chant that has proliferated in anti-Israel protests since the launch of the war, “From the river to the sea,” which is widely understood by its critics to call for a Palestinian state that supersedes Israel.
“Statements from the university are meaningless when pro-Hamas students march on campus calling for the complete destruction of Israel,” he said. Defenders of the phrase say it his evolved since it was coined in the 1960s, when it represented longings for Israel’s removal, to a call for a binational state.
The letter did not specify incidents. The Columbia campus has long been a hotbed of pro-Palestinian activism, and student groups there called immediately after the attack for the school to cut ties with a program in Tel Aviv. On Oct. 16, a 19-year-old allegedly assaulted a Columbia student who was putting up posters on campuses featuring hostages taken by Hamas during its attack. The campus was also briefly closed to the public because of unrest.
On Oct. 30, the day Swieca dated his letter, Jewish students at the New York City university held a press conference demanding more robust action to protect Jews. They noted that the university had not mentioned Hamas in its statements about the war.
The Jewish students cited as incidents of antisemitism the discovery of a swastika painted in a bathroom and listed other allegations, including that pro-Palestinian students carried signs saying “resistance is not terrorism” during an on-campus walkout and that, at Columbia’s law school, a student said “F— the Jews” to a visibly Jewish student. They also said Jews were targeted with antisemitic tropes in group chats and demanded that Columbia specifically condemn Hamas which it had not done until then.
Swieca’s bio page has disappeared from Columbia’s Board of Overseers listing. In his letter, Swieca says he graduated in 1982, a date also listed in his official biographies. The university has identified him as a 1983 graduate.
Glenn Hubbard, in 2014 the dean of the school, said in a release then that he looked forward to working with Swieca. “Given his business knowledge and expertise, along with his familiarity with Columbia Business School, I am certain he will provide tremendous insight to our community. I look forward to working closely with him in the years ahead,” Hubbard said.
Swieca said in the release that his education at the school was transformative. “Columbia Business School provided me with the foundational knowledge I needed to achieve professional success, and I have carried the lessons I learned in the classroom with me through all of my business ventures,” he said.
Talpion’s website says Swieca is the child of Holocaust survivors and grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City. It lists a number of philanthropies it backs, including the American Israel Education Fund, an arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Meor, a Jewish heritage study program. He runs a grant program that pays out $10,000 for programs that advance Jewish education and outreach. According to the Washington Post, Swieca also funded the expansion of an Israeli organization that aims to rebuild the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, a holy site for Muslims, an ambition that is widely understood as anti-Muslim.
Talpion’s website says that “the name of the company derives from the Biblical word ‘Talpiot’, meaning a castle’s turret, and is also the name of a highly elite intelligence unit of the IDF.”
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The post Jewish billionaire Henry Swieca quits Columbia Business School board, saying campus is ‘unsafe’ for Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UN Security Council to Meet Over Iran’s Growing Stockpile of Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium
Members of the Security Council cast a vote during a United Nations Security Council meeting on the 3rd anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at UN headquarters in New York, US, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
The United Nations Security Council will meet behind closed doors on Wednesday over Iran’s expansion of its stock of uranium close to weapons grade, diplomats said on Monday.
The meeting was requested by six of the council’s 15 members – France, Greece, Panama, South Korea, Britain, and the US.
They also want the council to discuss Iran’s obligation to provide the UN nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency – with “the information necessary to clarify outstanding issues related to undeclared nuclear material detected at multiple locations in Iran,” diplomats said.
Iran’s mission to the UN in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the planned meeting.
Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon. However, it is “dramatically” accelerating enrichment of uranium to up to 60 percent purity, close to the roughly 90 percent weapons-grade level, the IAEA has warned.
Western states say there is no need to enrich uranium to such a high level under any civilian program and that no other country has done so without producing nuclear bombs. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful.
Iran reached a deal in 2015 with Britain, Germany, France, the US, Russia, and China – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – that lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for restrictions on its nuclear program.
Washington quit the agreement in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, and Iran began moving away from its nuclear-related commitments.
Britain, France, and Germany have told the UN Security Council that they are ready – if needed – to trigger a so-called snap back of all international sanctions on Iran to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
They will lose the ability to take such action on Oct. 18 this year when the 2015 UN resolution on the deal expires. US President Donald Trump has directed his UN envoy to work with allies to snap back international sanctions and restrictions on Iran.
The post UN Security Council to Meet Over Iran’s Growing Stockpile of Near-Bomb-Grade Uranium first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Entire Families Killed in Syria’s Military Crackdown, UN Says
A man inspects a damaged car in Latakia, after hundreds were reportedly killed in some of the deadliest violence in 13 years of civil war, pitting loyalists of deposed President Bashar al-Assad against the country’s new Islamist rulers, Syria, March 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Haidar Mustafa
Entire families including women and children were killed in Syria’s coastal region as part of a series of sectarian killings by the army against an insurgency by Bashar al-Assad loyalists, the UN human rights office said on Tuesday.
Pressure has been growing on Syria’s Islamist-led government to investigate after reports by a war monitor of the killing of hundreds of civilians in villages where the majority of the population were members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
“In a number of extremely disturbing instances, entire families – including women, children, and individuals hors de combat – were killed, with predominantly Alawite cities and villages targeted in particular,” UN human rights office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said, using a French term for those incapable of fighting.
So far, the UN human rights office has documented the killing of 111 civilians and expects the real toll to be significantly higher, Al-Kheetan told a Geneva press briefing. Of those, 90 were men; 18 were women; and three were children, he added.
“Many of the cases documented were of summary executions. They appear to have been carried out on a sectarian basis,” Al-Kheetan told reporters. In some cases, men were shot dead in front of their families, he said, citing testimonies from survivors.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk welcomed an announcement by Syria’s Islamist-led government to create an accountability committee and called for those investigations to be prompt, thorough, independent, and impartial, the spokesperson added.
The post Entire Families Killed in Syria’s Military Crackdown, UN Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Western World Refuses to See the Truth About Syria, the Palestinians, and the Middle East
Rebel fighters holds weapons at the Citadel of Aleppo, after Syrian rebels announced that they have ousted Bashar al-Assad, in Aleppo, Syria, Dec. 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Karam al-Masri
Anyone who believed that Syria’s new leader — trading his military uniform for a tailored suit — represented a fresh hope for the Middle East has recently come to a sobering realization: the sea remains the same, the mountains remain unchanged, and the Middle East does not transform overnight.
The harrowing images emerging from Syria lay bare a grim reality. The forces of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, ideological heirs of ISIS, are humiliating, beating, and slaughtering members of the Alawite minority, which until recently ruled the country. As expected, the world — including the United Nations — maintains its usual silence, as long as Israel is not directly involved.
The harsh reality is that Syria has never truly been a sovereign nation. It has always been an open battlefield where global powers, terrorist organizations, and sectarian factions compete to establish facts on the ground. Russia, Iran, and Turkey all vie for influence, while the Alawites find themselves mercilessly hunted, after inflicting mass violence for the decades that they ruled the country.
Like Iraq, Lebanon, and many other Middle Eastern states, Syria was never a unified nation but rather a patchwork of sects, religions, and ethnic groups forcibly bound together by oppressive regimes. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was similarly born out of political circumstances rather than historical continuity or a cohesive identity. As history has demonstrated, those identified as “Palestinians” in the modern era originated from various other regions — Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. The struggle over Palestinian identity arose from an anti-Zionist political necessity rather than a deep-rooted historical reality.
Today, if someone were to quote former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s 1970s assertion that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”, they would be labeled as delusional, ultra-right-wing, or even messianic — or all of the above. Yet this famous statement, attributed to a leader of Israel’s leftist establishment, aligns directly with the contemporary reality in Syria. There are tribes, sects, economic and religious interests — but no “nation” in the Western sense of the term.
The shifting realities in Syria and the broader political developments in the region compel us to reconsider the terms we use — “nations”, “states”, “peoples” — which do not always apply to the Middle East in the same way they do in Europe or the United States. The events in Syria are yet another testament to the deep ethnic and religious rifts that prevent the emergence of a united nation — just as we have seen before in Lebanon, Iraq, and other artificially constructed states.
This illusion continues to shatter in fire, blood, and destruction – -yet many still refuse to see the truth. Those who ignore it will inevitably find themselves staring at new ruins, as history continues to dictate the rules of the Middle Eastern game.
Itamar Tzur is the author of The Invention of the Palestinian Narrative and an Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern history. He holds a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Jewish History and a Master’s degree with honors in Middle Eastern studies. As a senior member of the “Forum Kedem for Middle Eastern Studies and Public Diplomacy,” he leverages his academic expertise to deepen understanding of regional dynamics and historical contexts.
The post The Western World Refuses to See the Truth About Syria, the Palestinians, and the Middle East first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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